Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes Through Darkness and Light (updated and revised edition)

This is an update of Eden’s 2018 lyrical award-winning book tracing a journey from Odessa in Ukraine through Istanbul and on to storied Trebzon, with stops in Bessarabia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

War is the reason for the update, its impact impossible to deny in any exploration of the region today. Eden, keenly insightful and with an eye for the broader culture no matter where she is eating and drinking, makes the upheaval and destruction visceral in her new introduction, but elsewhere in the book preserves the world she saw nearly a decade ago.

There are recipes reflecting many intertwined cultures, and we do not mean to discount the appeal of black sesame challah or citrus-cured mackeral. But pluck those recipes away and Black Sea would still be enormously powerful and fascinating, enough so that one begins to wonder why someone doesn’t write this sort of book about every place.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.